Ryan Dahl - History of Node.js

Ryan Dahl video - History of Node.js

Love what Ryan Dahl has to say about being humble. link to this video Honestly, happens almost daily, especially in SF. We meet awesome developers, but they are frankly arrogant assholes. This sort of entitlement results in those people trolling and flaming. Be humble, there are many smart people in the world; you're not that awesome.

This might answer your question: link to this video TLDR: He didn't want to use an ecosystem that had existing blocking code. He wanted node to be pure in te sence that nothing was blocking. Starting on a clean slate enabled him to get everything pure non-blocking from the ground up. He admits that Js isn't the best language. But his rationale for not using an existing ecosystem (when it comes to IO) is not bad.

The creator of Node was something of a Rubyist, i believe the main reason was around the stdlib / ecosystem not being event oriented, making it difficult to build non-blocking applications. EventMachine may well have strategies to defeat this, I just don't know. This video gives some good insight into what led to his decision to start fresh rather than try and change things in Ruby link to this video So that's probably the biggest thing about Node - everything in the core is built with event orientation in mind, so you know you're not going to hit something that will block and kill you, and that minset is pervasive in userland too.

Ryan Dahl has said he invented NodeJS to solve the file upload progress bar problem (link to this video). Using technology available in 2009 when Node was introduced, so before Express and more advanced client-side javascript libraries that automagically tell you progress updates, how exactly did NodeJS solve this problem? Trying to use just Core NodeJS now, I understand with the request stream I can look at the header, get the total file size, and then get the size of each chunk of data as it comes through, to tell me the percent complete. But then I don't understand how to stream those progress updates back to the browser, since the browser doesn't seem to update until request.end(). Once again I…

Node was created to make scripting fast servers easy. Nothing more, nothing less. Because JS (as implemented in the browser and known by many programmers) didn't carry the baggage of blocking IO calls, Ryan thought it would be a good language for an event-loop based server. History of Node.js: link to this video